South Carolina’s top public health doctor warns senators wrong lessons being learned from COVID

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s top doctor came before a small group of state senators on Thursday to tell them he thinks a bill overhauling how public health emergencies are handled in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has some bad ideas, concerns echoed by Gov. Henry McMaster.

As drafted, the bill would prevent mandating vaccines unless they have been licensed by the Food and Drug Administration for 10 years. That means that health care providers would be blocked from requiring flu vaccines or other shots that get yearly updates for ever-changing viruses, said Dr. Edward Simmer, director of the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

In addition to loosening restrictions on who can visit people in isolation, the measure would also require symptom-free patients to be released from quarantine well before some infectious diseases begin to show outward signs, Simmer said at a Thursday hearing.

“There are a number of issues that we believe where this bill would cause harm to the people of South Carolina and would in fact cause unnecessary death amongst people of South Carolina during a public health crisis because it would prevent us from taking actions that could save lives,” Simmer said.

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The bill passed the Senate subcommittee on a 4-3 vote, but with eight weeks to go in the General Assembly’s session, it still has to get through the body’s Medical Affairs Committee and a vote on the Senate floor before it can even be sent to the House.

In a further sign of the hurdles the bill faces, McMaster sent the subcommittee a letter saying “placing overbroad restrictions on the authority of public health officials, law enforcement officers, first responders, and emergency management professionals responding to emerging threats and disasters—whether public health or otherwise — is a bad idea.”

A similar subcommittee met in September, where many speakers sewed doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy, as well as distrust in the scientific establishment.

Members on Thursday listened to Simmer and took up some amendments on his concern and promised to discuss his other worries with the bill.

“You are making some good points, Dr. Simmer. I’m writing them all down,” Republican Sen. Richard Cash of Powdersville said.

The proposal would require health officials to release someone from quarantine if they didn’t show symptoms for five days. Simmers said people with diseases like measles, meningitis, bird flu and Ebola are contagious, but may not show symptoms for a week or more.

“I don’t think we would want after 10 days to release a person known to be infected with Ebola into the public,” Simmer said.

Supporters of the bill said they weren’t happy that during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic hospitals and nursing homes put patients into isolation. Allowing quicker releases from isolation and letting more people to visit someone in quarantine was a response to that issue.

Cash told Simmer that when the pandemic shutdown started, his wife had just endured a 17-hour cancer surgery and he was ordered to leave her bedside.

“Whatever she’s got, I got. But I still had to go,” Cash said.

Simmer said those decisions were made by the private nursing homes, hospitals and health care facilities. He said he had sympathy for decisions that had to be made quickly without much data, but he thought they were still wrong and pointed out the state didn’t order anyone to take a vaccine or isolate entire facilities.

“We saw the pictures of people seeing nursing home patients through a window. They should have been allowed in,” Simmer said. “When that didn’t happen that was a mistake. That was a lesson learned from COVID.”

Simmer asked lawmakers to pay attention to what actually happened during the pandemic and not just what they think happened.

“If this bill is designed to address concerns about COVID, we should recognize what did and did not happen during the pandemic,” Simmer said.